Artist

Guglielmo Castelli

Italy

Love everlasting, 50 x 40 cm, oil on canvas, 2017

Guglielmo Castelli’s painting reveals an hybrid and subtly violent iconographic universe, where bodies and objects ceaselessly merge one into another. Human figures — investigated in both their physical and mental extension — are the subject of his representation, while space is his experimental field. Castelli questions the relation between inner and outer space, between bowels and environment, and somehow overturns the precepts of Italian Renaissance painting, with its strict geometric and rational system. Released from any constraint, figures slip and overlap on either neutral backdrops or unfamiliar landscapes, flowing like lightning flashes, clouds at dusk and wind-torn vegetation. From fluid and wide, his brushstrokes coagulate into thick knots that are used to portray melancholy, astonishment and wonder, while his characters melt in gentle yet cruel chromatic accents, suspended in uncertain postures that reflect an unsteady grip on reality.